Thom Yorke : Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes

8 years after The Eraser out on XL recocrdings, Thom Yorke self-releases his 2nd solo album along the long time Radiohead producer, Nigel Godrich, and cover artist Stanley Downwood.

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is a kind of listening experience that is quickly forgotten afterwards…Like a dream, it is intense and is wished to be revived countless times. This album envelopes Thom Yorke’s vocal in a new way. Absence of instruments such as guitar and drums are visible as it is more concentrated or rather emphasized on the piano and on the electronic work i.e the beats and the textures.

On The Eraser, cover-artist Stanley Downwood was inspired by the legend of King Canute failing to command the ocean. On Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, it consists of no legend but made one by using elements and soundtracks from the album on the 2nd version of the Polyfauna app. Polyfauna; which is a collaboration between Radiohead and, the british digital arts studio, Universal Everything.

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes was released independently via a paid-for BitTorrent bundle. Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich expressed their wish to find “an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work”. The album was downloaded over a million times within six days of release, and became the most most-downloaded legal torrent of 2014. By February 2015, it had been downloaded over 4.5 million times.